This SP release is a pretty major service pack, and incorporates a lot of bug-fixes and feedback from customers. Included built-in with the service pack is support for VS 2005 Web Application Projects (which we also made available as a separate download back in May). It also contains a number of design-time performance optimizations and fixes across the product.

Some Suggestions on Installing the Service Pack

The service pack itself is a fairly large download (431Mb), and can take 30-90 minutes to update your Visual Studio 2005 installation depending on which versions of VS you have installed, and what features are enabled. So you should plan ahead and not expect it to be a few second operation (note: it is a good task to kick off before lunch or in the evening).

A few suggestions/comments on the setup process:

1) Before starting the SP1 upgrade make sure you first uninstall the standalone VS 2005 Web Application Project download if you've installed that on your system. You'll no longer need this as support for it is built-in to SP1, and the SP1 installer will block and make you uninstall it if you have it installed. Your existing web application project files will continue to work just fine - so you won't need to-do anything to update them to work with SP1.

2) SP1 will run the upgrade patching process on each copy of Visual Studio 2005 it finds on your system. So if you have VS 2005 Professional, Visual Web Developer Express, and Visual Basic Express on your system, it will run the patching process 3 times (since each of these installs have separate copies of some files). If you aren't using all of these versions on your system, you might want to uninstall some of them - both to save yourself some disk space as well as to speed up the SP1 install process.

3) SP1 will patch/update all files/features in VS 2005 that you have installed. Sometimes I just click "install everything" when I setup VS 2005, in which case I get a lot of features that I often don't use (for example: some of the C++ header/lib sources for ATL, MFC, etc). What I've seen on my personal system is that when I only have the features I use installed, the SP1 upgrade process takes about 15 minutes end to end. But with everything it can take closer to 45-50 minutes. You might want to consider unchecking certain features of VS if you aren't using them and want to both save some disk space as well as speed up the SP1 install process.

One last built performance suggestion

SP1 does include a number of build performance improvements (for both VB and C#). For suggestions on how to optimize Web Site and Web Project build performance with VS 2005, I also highly recommend you check out my optimizing build performance blog post here. This will help you optimize your build times significantly for both RTM and SP1 systems.

Hope this helps,

Scott

P.S. Some people have noticed that my pictures and sample downloads on my site are missing at the moment. Unfortunately the Puget Sound region was hit by a really bad storm last night, and all electrical power was knocked out in the area shortly before 1am (exactly 3 minutes after I finished my ASP.NET AJAX RC post last night - I hit submit just in time <g>). Both my house and the Microsoft campus are without power at the moment, which means the server hosting my pictures/downloads is not running. They are hoping to get us power again in the next few days, at which time my server will (fingers crossed) come back up. Until then I'm hanging out in a very crowded Starbucks for heat/light and will also be sporadic on email. Sorry in advance for any delays.

i'm running Visual Studio Team Edition with the beta of SP1 on Vista. I wanted to uninstall the beta of SP1 but it doesn't show up in Add/Remove programs and when i try to unstill the full release of SP1, it claims i'm not running the correct version of the product....

When trying to uninstall Webapp projects, I'm getting an error 'Error opening installation log file. Verify that the specified log file location exists and is writable'. I'm running Vista RTM with UAC disabled and I am the admin. I reinstalled the Web Application Projects but then it fails again when I try to uninstall. Any ideas? Is there a way to manually uninstall Web Application Projects?

I am Vista and did not install the Beta of VS05 SP1 but get this message

"The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch"

Don&#39;t know if this happened for anyone else, but after I install &quot;VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe&quot;, it then asks if I want to install it again. &nbsp;I did it again to see what it would do, and it seemed to reinstall it. &nbsp;It asked me again after it was done, but I clicked &#39;Cancel&#39; and it ended. &nbsp;It seems to have installed it though.

Slipstreaming builds will be available next year - which will integrate the patches into new setups for clean installs. The plan will be to update the Express downloads for new users to get SP1 enabled builds without having to install the patch separately.

Can you double check that you have a lot of available disk space? I'm wondering if the problem was caused by you running out of disk space? If this isn't the cause, then please send me an email with the details and I'll be happy to connect you up with someone on the VS team who can help investigate further.

could you explain why the installer takes such a long time and uses 100% CPU?

I am just curious, because I have never seen any installer behave this way (it's been 'gathering requirements' at 100% CPU for 15 minutes now).
Also, even though you warned it might take a long time, you didn't mention it would take 100% CPU. You can imagine people are worried when they see this.

I just blogged about how to uninstall the SP1 Beta when running on Windows Vista. You can follow these steps here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/12/16/installing-vs-2005-sp1-on-vista-and-how-to-uninstall-the-vs-2005-sp1-beta-on-vista.aspx

The installation time is pretty intense because patches don't just replace a file - instead they update portions of it (to keep the patch size down).

The installer needs to-do the following steps:

1) Uncompress the patch and extract a file bits
2) Check whether the file to patch has a newer QFE already - in which case the SP shouldn't update it
3) Apply the patch to the origional file and merge in the diff
4) Move on to the next file and repeat the process

Since there are 15,000+ files in VS with everything installed, this takes awhile and is pretty CPU and disk intensive.

I have roughly 2 gigs free on the partition that contains my %TEMP% folder. Every other partition still has at least 5GB free or more. My Windows partition has over 6GB available; this is also the partition where I installed VS2005.

I tried shuffling things around, cleaning up the various TEMP folders, etc, but still ran into the problem, even after trying to redirect my %TEMP% folder to another partition with even more space.

Here's the interesting part--I eventually extracted the files from VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe with WinRAR, and ran the .MSP file directly. It now looks like the service pack is installing (it's been running for at least 10 minutes now as I'm writing this, whereas before it would fail within the first 30 seconds).

Hi Daren,
About the &rdquo;The installation source for this product is not available&rdquo; problem &ndash; if you are you using Windows Server 2003:
If you extract the .exe file and see the properties on the .msp file under &quot;Digital Signatures&quot; you will see that the signature/certificate is not valid. (ScottGu: i presume this is a bug?).
To &rdquo;fix&rdquo; (ignore) this:
1) Open local security setting: Start -&gt; Programs -&gt; Administrative Tools -&gt; Local Security Policy.
2) Click on &quot;Software Restriction Policies&quot; and if it shows &quot;No Software Restriction Policies Defined&quot; then insert a new (right click the left pane node).
3) 2 x click on the &quot;Enforcement&quot; entry and under &quot;Apply software restriction policies to the following users:&quot; section change to &quot;All users except local administrators&quot;.
4) Maybe reboot
This should solve the problem (it did for me)..
/Anders

I'm running W2k3R2 and have the "The installation source for this product is not available” problem. I tried the solution Anders provide above with no luck. I have 3 gig of space available so I don't think space is an issue.

Unfortunately the power literally went off in Seattle about 10 minutes before the Vista patch was uploaded to the MSDN download server - which is why it isn't there now. The power is back on and we should have the patch out by Monday.

Great to see SP1 out of beta - it installs perfectly on our VS 2005 Team Suites.

I'm especially happy with the that that Microsoft is back on track releasing service packs for the Visual Studio environment - we were anxiously awating this one (thanks for making it available to us this early).

The good news is that VS 2005 SP1 now allows you to control the exact port number and virtual path used - you are no longer restricted to a dynamic one.

Just select the web-site root project node in your solution explorer, and then within the property grid you can change the "VirtualPath" property to "/", set the dynamic port to false, and then after a few seconds change the Port Number to anything you want.

Does this service pack include the fix/resolution for the MS Project integration error where the Active Directory user account names have a comman (such as Ewer, Mark) and MS Project considers this to be two resources instead of one person?

Where can I find a list of what fixes are contained in the service pack? I've done the normal Google and MS searching and could only find the release notes which basically contains instalation issues.

I specificaly want to know if ASP.NET VB "websites" now respect the option strict and explicit in the web.config? I would also like more information on websites vs. web projects (but I think I can find that by searching your blogs).

I've been trying to find a list of bug fixes/enhancements that sp1 will provide. I've already installed the service pack, just want to know what to expect (and what's not necessarily expected) from it. There was a list, about 5 items long, that had some general enhancements, but I'm looking for more detailed bugs/enhancements.

Thanks for all of the hard work. Is there a list of the hotfixes that are included in SP1? We have installed a few of the hotfixes that have to do with VB.NET performance and we need to know if these are included...

I just sent mail to the servicing team to see if there is a master list of all issues fixed with this service pack. I am going to try and get this posted in the next few weeks (unfortunately many people are out because of holidays - so it might be in Jan when it gets done).

The "installation source is not available" means that the setup program needs to copy a file from the origional CD/DVD or network share containing the Visual Studio files. Can you check the path of the dialog and insert the DVD with the corresponding files into the computer?

To fix the ASP.NET AJAX Intellisense issue, you need to do the following step:

Delete the cached schema files for control markup Intellisense that VS maintains. This will ensure that your HTML source editor Intellisense for the ASP.NET AJAX controls is correct and doesn't get lost (otherwise it might incorrectly use the old values from the Beta2 release).

- With Windows XP you do this by deleting all files in this directory: c:\Document and Settings\[YourUserName]\Application Data\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ReflectedSchemas

- With Windows Vista you do this by deleting all files in this directory: c:\Users\[YourUserName]\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\VisualStudio\8.0\ReflectedSchemas

Once you delete these schema files and restart VS, it will re-calculate the HTML markup Intellisense for all controls the first time you switch into design view, and pick up the changes from the assembly name change.

Hi Scott,
Thanks for the update.
I downloaded the SP1, then uninstalled Web application projects, and then tried to apply the SP1, but it failed. I tried so many times, but it keeps giving the following error:
"The installer has encountered an unexpected error installing this package. This may indicate a problem with this package. The error code is 2908"

Scott, unfortunately you look like you've become the de facto Microsoft support desk on this Service Pack! I've got a few issues with VS2k5 but based on all the comments, perhaps I should wait for a service pack for the service pack? :)

Re-setup issue:
My experiences installing the sp1 on win2k3 (i tried with the full install of a msdn professional subscription in open license)
- The stupid &quot;did not pass digital signature check&quot; error first, but the workaround solved it.
- The first setup (5-10 minutes): &quot;...updating visual studio 2005 premier partner enu...&quot; (what is this !?)
- Immediately after that finished, a second setup started automatically (20-30 minutes): &quot;...updating visual studio 2005 professional edition enu...&quot;
Maybe that is the normal way for the subcription versions...
Anyway the UI of this setup is quite annoying and low quality:
&quot;gathering required information&quot; for 10 min
or
installing at 0% for 20 min
no local help, no local readme, no fixed bugs list, no new features list etc.

Scott, one thing I noticed that may be forcing the patch to use more memory than it needs is that when it runs, the patch creates two processes. One is the standard MSI process (which eats 100% of the CPU and runs at about 60MB). The other, however, has the same process name as the original compressed executable of the service pack and consumes about 500MB of memory while remaining idle. This may be by design, but it seems like after unpacking the archive, the entire archive process remains in memory instead of exiting and then running the update.

Can you try to download the setup patch again to make sure that the problem isn't being caused by sometype of file corruption on download? If that doesn't fix it, can you send me email and I will loop you in with someone on the VS servicing team to help.

We installed it here at my office and ran into a problem with the sourcesafe integration.

Typically, to do a "clean" build we completely blow away all the folders and files on the machine, then open the solution from sourcesafe.

When we tried that after SP1 we got an error msg "One or more projects in the solution could not be loaded for the following reasons: The project file or web has been moved, renamed or is not on your computer." OK was the only choice.

Then another error window "Some of the properties associated with the solution could not be read.".

This solution does have a website in it, along with some class libraries and forms applications...

We tried to install the SP1 but we got this "Error 1718. File filename was rejected by digital signature policy". We followed the instruction to workaround on the support page provided but did not help.
We are using Win2005 server and VS 2005 Professional. We don't have the SP1 beta and web application project.
Thanks!

DOOOHH! I had even not installed the Web Deployment Project on this (new) machine. I just thought about it as a part of the Web Application Project (it could have been!?). So now after installing the Web Deployment Project everything works just fine.

error:
"The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch"

Any ideas? I tried to install the latest MSI but it said everything was OK...

I have noticed that after installing SP1, that all of the declarations in a page's designer file are being prefixed with "Global." This did not seem to happen with Beta SP1. Just making sure this is to be expected:

Hi Scott,
I just downloaded SP1 and would like to know on beforehand if I need to uninstall all installments that relate to .NET FW 3.0, before moving on to install SP1.
This is what I have installed currently (4 pieces):
- Microsoft .NET FW 3.0
- &quot;WPF/E&quot; (codename) Community Technology Preview (Dec 2006)
- Visual Studio 2005 extensions for .NET Framework 3.0 (WCF &amp; WPF), November 2006 CTP
- Visual Studio 2005 Extensions for Windows Workflow Foundation
I also would like to know if the AJAX Extensions RC stuff (all three existing MSIs) I just installed will not cause trouble when installing SP1.
Thanx in advance,
Pieter

I encountered several breaking errors when downloading sp1 directly in IE. so I tried with netants, although it completed and show a 100% download, but I noticed some errors in the logs of a few downloading threads. So I doubt about the correctness of the resulting file.
the file length is 452,643,696 bytes, no digital signature tab displayed for the self-extract file, VS80sp1-KB926601-X86-ENU.exe.
after self-extracting, the msp file is 477,190,144 bytes in size, also not ditital signature tab.
Since I don&#39;t want to try downloading another time, could anyone tell me from the description above that my downloading is success or failed?
Thanks a lot.

I have tried to install this service pack a few times but after a while my laptop just turned off. I have never had any application having such a stong result. It is not hanging or crashing, it just instantly turn off my laptop. Any ideas?

Is there any alternative ftp site to download this service pack?
I'm getting error message: "This operation has been cancelled due to restrictions in effect on this computer.", when I try to save the file from microsoft download center.
Thanks,
Kris

Scott, I did #1
1) Before starting the SP1 upgrade make sure you first uninstall the standalone VS 2005 Web Application Project download if you&#39;ve installed that on your system. &nbsp;You&#39;ll no longer need this as support for it is built-in to SP1, and the SP1 installer will block and make you uninstall it if you have it installed. &nbsp;Your existing web application project files will continue to work just fine - so you won&#39;t need to-do anything to update them to work with SP1.
and now my web app project won&#39;t open.
I also experienced the installation package wanting to install several times. &nbsp;I only let it go once, should I have let it go again?
Thanx ..

Scott,
I&#39;ve checked and profiles are not supported. I&#39;ve tried the profile generation tool and personally don&#39;t like this as a solution, not to mention that it doesn&#39;t completely work correctly. I have a customer that I&#39;m creating a portal type website that houses approximately twenty different applications, to be available for Intranet users as well as Public users, so the portions of the site(s) don&#39;t fit well in the Web Site projects model. Not having Personalization built into Web Application Project makes development a lot more difficult than it should be. Do you have any idea if Profiles will be added later? If so, when? If not, can you ask for it? Pretty please?
Darren

To Sandro (Laptop turn-off):
It's because stupid microsoft created complicated setup (that can be very simply in real life) that overheat your notebook processor and laptop turns-off to protect the processor. What laptop dou you have, model and config.?

Nevermind, I am finding your blog posts that tell about the distinctions. Disregard earlier questions, except I am still curious why I can't start a web server in my website project after the upgrade to SP1...

Can you provide more details on what error you are seeing with the website not being started? Have you configured a custom launch tool as part of the project? If so - have you checked out this post of mine that describes a better way to-do this with SP1: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2006/12/19/tip-trick-how-to-run-a-root-site-with-the-local-web-server-using-vs-2005-sp1.aspx

This morning I learned that I have to install Visual Studio 2005 SP1. Why? Becuase Visual Studio 2005 suddenly refused to let me open web application projects. It started displaying this error on each attempt to open a web application project or solution file:
"project type is not supported by this installation"

After further review, I realized the Web Application Project option had been removed from the New Project dialog box inside Visual Studio. Running the web application project installer failed to restore it.

My guess is something installed by Windows Update during the last 7 days caused this problem- most likely a stand-alone security patch for VS 2005 that I see has been installed.

This error conditiion is going to cause headaches for many, many Visual Studio developers. If I hadn't run into this blog post about the new SP1 release, I could have easily spent all day trying to resolve the problem.

I think what might have happened is that you cancelled out of setup before it had finished. I just posted a new blog post here: http://weblogs.asp.net/scottgu/archive/2007/01/01/a-few-vs-2005-sp1-links-and-information-nuggets.aspx that covers a lot of additional information about SP1 (including how you can check whether it is installed). Can you try that out?

I am using Web Site Projects from SP1 to host WCF services. When I host the services in the Visual Studio Development Server, navigating to the Service.svc url results in a 404 error. The logged exception looks as follows:

Does anyone have a MD5 (or SHA) hash for the download? That would make it easier to verify that the file was downloaded properly. I couldn't find one on the download page, KB article, or the download prompt page...

I saw someone post about the "Index was outside the bounds of the array" error received when trying to publish. Has there been a fix to this? I am seeing this error along with a coworker. We have vs2k5 team edition for devs on win xp. We have a lot of projects we work on and use the publish function, so to have this broken is a problem.

I'm facing a serious issue while installing VS 2005 SP1 on Windows XP system & having VS 2005 with Hotfix KB910275 , update KB898904 and update KB915364; I donot have either beta or WebApplication Projects installed. The system gets crashed while installing the SP1. I have followed the installation steps clearly.

I downloaded the SP yesterday, took over 1 hour on our T1
Decided to defrag and scan disk before installation so I took it and installed it on my laptop.
Start at 5:20 PM
got Please wat message at 5:26
Fan kicked on at 5:28 because of 100% CPU usage
Received Do you want to do this message at 5:30
Gathering required message at 5:33
Called to dinner at 5:47
Returned at 6:18
0 seconds left at 6:22
Installed message at 6:37
Finally done at 6:38

Installed VS2005 SP1 on development PC. Compiled C++ COM dll and now it won't register on PC without SP1. Installing SP1 worked, but not all our customers have VS2005. Any ideas? Is there another distro available - or compiler switches?
Thanks!

I've been trying to research on my disk space problem after installing SP1 when I stumbled on the posts here...

Scott, you mentioned that after the install, it should have itself cleaned up. My problem is that after my Windows Update install, my free disk space of 4+ Gb went down to 1+ Gb. Kinda weird since SP1 shouldn't be beyond 500 Mb.

At first few tries in installing SP1, they failed because I didn't know I need to uninstall Web Application Projects add-in first. I did that and ran Windows Update again, installing SP1 successfully. But there I noticed the big loss in disk space. Restarting the computer didn't make any improvements, and running Disk Cleanup didn't help either (can't detect any large temporary files at all). I tried to search for hidden folders with large contents... nada.

I've been trying to search for some answers through blogs all day. I hope someone would be able to point me to the right direction. :)

I appreciate you keeping this communication channel open, but a quick look through these posts is enough to give any system administrator a serious pause. I don't recall a software update causing so many issues while trying to run - never mind actually getting installed.

I am now seeing "Error 1718. File C:\Windows\Installer\81bd1ed6.msp did not pass the digital signature check, presumably due to lack of contigous memory. I am doing this on a busy server. Whatever the merits of digital signing, they are worthless if they cause this much trouble.

May I submit that those in charge of creating these service packs should think through a bit more carefully on the impact of their decisions on a broad range of users?

Hey Scott,
I apologize, but I don't see a clear answer about the "Gathering Required Information" hang-up. I have come to a point where I am nearly incapable of installing anything on my computer because everything gets hung up on "Gathering Information".

Agreed, the SP1 is slow to install, my installation has been doing on for 1 hour, still on the "Gathering required information.." dialog. This is after I aborted the process twice thinking it was just hung, reading this and Heather's blog I finally decided to let it slog. Enuf said. I wanted to know is anybody experiencing any major issues after the install has happened? I am using just the Visual C++ environment and my project also uses STLPort. Anybody else has experience of the same, how did it work out? Because I would like to recommend to my team to update if things look good. Also could you detail if you noticed any performance improvement? Like the horrible "Updating Intellisense" bug, is it fixed?

The "Index was outside the bounds of the array" issue happens when you try and publish a site when you have a root virtual path configured for the built-in web-server.

This was unfortunately a bug regression that slipped into SP1. We are working on a QFE patch, though, that you will be able to download to fix it. If you want to send me an email I'd be happy to put you on the list to get notified when it is available.

I see a couple of people that were having problems seeing the web application template after sp1 install, but I don't really see a solution. I have installed sp1 on standard edition and don't see a web application template (or any web templates for that matter).

When installing SP1 it gets a little over half way through 'gathering required information' then shuts down my whole computer! I've tried it 4 times now, each with the same result. After the 3rd try I uninstalled VS and reinstalled, but still no luck. I'm stumped.